that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”As one questioner in the audience asked,
To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?Denial of climate change has nothing to do with quibbles about the science. It springs from a sense that the American way of life -- big cars, big houses, long commutes, big lawns mowed with tractors, strip malls, and so on -- is under attack by leftists who have always hated that American way of life and have now found the perfect cover for their hatred. I think there is some truth in this. Many environmentalists have always just hated the bigness for its own sake so beloved by many Americans and feel thrilled that climate science supports their moral outrage.
The thing is, the climate science does support their moral outrage. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will change the planet in ways we can't predict and which might be catastrophic. That this is convenient for enviro-leftists does not change the science.
Since people are not going to accept mandated energy conservation, the only hope of stabilizing the atmospheric CO2 level is new technology, from more fuel efficient cars to oil producing algae. Conservatives who want to preserve the American way of life should be massively promoting these technologies instead of gloating over the collapse of Solyndra.
One of the hardest things for pure capitalism to deal with is the "tragedy of the commons." The libertarian answer is that there should be no commons, everything should be owned. Overfishing? The oceans should be owned, etc.
ReplyDeleteClimate change is a pure form of the tragedy of the commons. There is no way to apply ownership models to alleviate it, without government.
In that sense, climate change is a threat to their simplistic view of capitalism, and they are projecting that as the deliberate goal of the climate science, rather than the fact that climate science is just one in a long line of examples of known cases where pure capitalism breaks down.